Liberating The Fingers: Strat Knob Placement

Having the finished neck with me here at home has been a joy even though I can't play on it yet.  It just looks great and helps to solidify the notion that this guitar build thing is actually happening...  Because, you know, it is actually happening.  Anyway, I've got the neck sitting in my lap as I type this and the little birdies are smiling up at me.  Hi there!

But down to business.  In my Contrasts And Components post, I presented an image of the body of the Strat with the paint job done and hardware installed on it:

Body of Big Riff, Version 1.0.

But over time, I've gazed disdainfully upon the classic Strat design's one glaring error: that volume knob sitting RIGHT next to where the high E string would be strung, and so close to the bridge that it hinders palm muting.  I don't know why I didn't think of this earlier.  I guess I was so bent on getting the neck and the Floyd Rose setup right (more on that in a later post) that it slipped my mind.

I'm pretty sure Leo Fender didn't stop and think, "You know, I bet there will come a day when players want to play very fast and pluck the strings while muting them near the bridge with their palm, with loads of gain screaming out of their amplifiers at high volume.  I should probably just do away with one of these three knobs so that those kinds of players can totally go for it and still buy my brand thirty to sixty years in the future!"

Note to guitar manufacturers everywhere: KEEP THE DAMN KNOBS AWAY FROM THE STRINGS.  I'm tired of hitting them with my knuckles when my right hand fingers are curled in.  I'm also tired of second-guessing that the volume is still all the way up when I have to curl my ring and pinky fingers around the knob when they're flared out.

Palm Mute Exhibit A: Fingers curled in for faster licks.  Knuckles make contact with the volume knob.

Palm Mute Exhibit B: Fingers flared out to help anchor the hand down for more expressive, heavier-handed "chunk".  Too easy to grab the knob and turn it by accident, pulling volume down.

I may be the tweaker type when it comes to amp and pedal settings, but I never need more than a volume and a tone knob on a guitar, and a three-way selector switch.  Well, except for this one thing that's specific to Big Riff: There is an option to wire a knob to act as the driver control for the Sustainiac pickup when it's turned on. Perhaps I thought that I would keep the Strat's three knobs and utilize one of them for this driver controller, which I truly would like to have available on the top of the guitar if possible.

So I want the function of three knobs in two spaces.  What to do?  The answer may lie in the function of the concentric potentiometer.  Basically, it means two pots are crammed together, one on top of the other, with separate terminal sets for wiring.  I've never owned a guitar with one installed but they are common enough:

But of course I'm going with black.

I assume that I would simply put the guitar's volume and tone control functions together on the same concentric pot, but I haven't explored what else I could do with it yet.  I need to put in some research on rating (I'm assuming I'll need 500K) and the depth on the bottom side so it would mount properly to the pickguard without space complications underneath.

To be clear, I am not fond of and have no plans to use push-pull pots, either for the function of splitting the Duncan Distortion to a single-coil (had that on a Schecter in the past and never used it) or for turning the Sustainiac driver on and off.  I want two small switches mounted on the pickguard near the pickup selector: one for the on/off toggle, and the other for the regular/5th harmonic mode toggle.

Body of Big Riff, Version 2.0.  Two knobs.

I thought that I had completed the design phase of the guitar build and would simply move on to the purchasing and assembly phases, but I see now that the design functions of this process remain interwoven into the others.  There is still time to make miniscule changes, with the exception of the final decision of what to do with the Floyd Rose bridge as it affects the body design.  I may have a window of opportunity to order the body in either October or November, so the next post will be devoted to declaring once and for all what I'll do.

Seahawks football opened with a bang this past week and there was a free concert by Century Link Field with Soundgarden and Pharrell Williams (how in the world does that happen?).  My girlfriend and I were in downtown near the action that day but we missed the show.  Anyway, I kept jokingly singing "Rusty Cage" at her and wound up falling in love with the song all over again: